Introduction to Open Access

The following text was adapted from the  article on Open Access in English wikipedia   (december 2006).

Open access (OA) is the free online availability of digital content. It is best-known and most feasible for peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles, which scholars publish without expectation of payment.

The first major international statement on open access, which includes a definition, background information, FAQ, and a list of signatories, is the Budapest Open Access Initiative from February 2002. The other two leading statements are the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing from June 2003 and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities from October 2003. The conception of open access in these three statements, which is often called the BBB definition, launched, inspired, and continues to guide the open access movement.

There are two roads to open access (OA), with many variations.

1. In open access publishing , [1] also known as the "gold" road to OA, journals make their articles openly accessible immediately on publication. Examples of open access publishers are BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.
2. In open access self-archiving, also called the "green" road to OA, authors make copies of their own published articles openly accessible, generally in a subject or institutional repository. A leading proponent of the "green" school since 1994 ^[2] is Stevan Harnad.

Open access is the subject of much discussion amongst academics, librarians, university administrators, government official, commercial publishers, and learned society publishers. There is substantial disagreement about the concept of open access, along with much debate and discussion about the economics of funding an open access scholarly communications system.